With the increasing number of entertainment options and technologies available to consumers, advertisers are constantly looking to increase the efficacy of advertisements and other marketing efforts. As an example, television commercials are in danger of losing their potency and relevancy due to the widespread adoption of digital video recorders (DVR's) that provide consumers with the ability to easily skip through commercials. Furthermore, many consumers are migrating to other forms of entertainment such as the Internet. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for advertisers to find innovative and creative techniques to captivate the consumer's attention and become more closely integrated with a consumer's life.
Likewise, given the vast amount of content that is available to consumers from various entertainment media, and thus increased competition for consumer attention, content providers are also on the lookout for new techniques for providing attractive content to consumers.
An emerging technology that may revolutionize a number of types of media is personal character replacement. Character replacement allows users to replace a character within a digital media presentation with their own likeness. For example, character replacement may be used in video games to enable a user to replace the face and/or body of a character in a game with a custom person of his or her choosing, often enabling a user to turn himself or herself into the hero or protagonist of the game. In addition, character replacement may be used in movies or other scripted entertainment, allowing audience members to take the place of the onscreen characters. In a related area, many video games, particularly sports-related games, characters may be based upon real individuals, e.g., professional athletes, typically using similar techniques to those used to insert users' likenesses into a media presentation.
While character replacement can be computationally intense, and may be limited in terms of realism in many applications (particularly when required to be performed in real time), the continual improvements in computer hardware and software technologies will inevitably improve the realism of character replacement, as well as open up new applications for the technology.
One area in which character replacement could have a significant potential is in personalizing advertisements such as television commercials. It is believed that consumer attention and interest in a television commercial could be significantly increased by having the consumer become the “star” in the commercial. However, the introduction of consumers into commercials and other media content raises a number of issues in terms of consumer privacy as well as other legal and practical issues.
In particular, along with the ability to introduce a user's likeness into situations that a user may find acceptable or desirable, character replacement has the ability to introduce a user's likeness into situations that a user may find offensive or otherwise undesirable. A user may have religious or moral objections to certain products or industries, and may not wish to watch himself or herself promoting certain products. Furthermore, a user may not desire to have his or her likeness introduced into an embarrassing situation or otherwise be portrayed in a negative light.
As a result, privacy and other legal and practical issues arising from the incorporation of users' likenesses into media content represent a significant impediment to widespread adoption of character replacement technologies in advertisements and other types of media content. Furthermore, these impediments arise principally from the simple fact that in most instances a content provider cannot predict with certainty what types of character replacement situations would be found to be acceptable or objectionable by different users, and it is impractical for a content provider or producer to obtain the expressed permission of each user prior to incorporating that user's likeness into media content. A significant need therefore exists in the art for a technical solution that enables users to control the manner in which their likeness may be incorporated into various types of media content using character replacement.